


To Be Better

by HelloHeadquarters



Category: Apex Legends (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:28:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27256438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HelloHeadquarters/pseuds/HelloHeadquarters
Summary: Elliott thinks about Elliott, and love.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 16





	To Be Better

Elliott is having a terrible day. Elliott is watching Ajay as she flits around, his eyes locked to the medic and wondering. Does she still love her parents? For all their sins, and all that they have done, does she still think of them as family? Ajay pushes a stray hair from Natalie's eyes and laughs as the electrical engineer squirms at the tickle. Do her parents even still matter to her at all?

Ajay's mother, regardless of her actions, spent nine months nurturing the life in her womb. Spent days and weeks discomforted and nervous as she transformed to accommodate the life blossoming within her, and spent hours, maybe even days in agony just to expel this little person into the world. Ajay's mother gave her life, brought her up in the world until one day Ajay turned around and told her she could not live with all that she had done. Until Ajay left her behind, after years spent learning how to be better and more than her upbringing, until Ajay said that there was no room inside her to make peace with what her parents had done.

But that doesn't mean, he thinks with a roll of his shoulders, that she no longer loves them.

Natalie is smiling and Elliott feels something hollow inside him. Natalie has no parents. Natalie was orphaned so young, and yet she still finds light in that darkness, still finds a place where she is loved and wanted and admired. 

He turns away and looks down at his hands.

He's used these hands to create marvels, to craft wonders out of light, to be more than just Evelyn Witt's son. To be a person, an intellect in his own right, but it's meaningless to him. Because Elliott doesn't want to be some legend that can only be admired from a distance, to be some exonerated scientist whose work is everything they are because he's just so damn lonely and he wants someone to miss him.

He wants it to be problem when he is not around.

He just wants to be loved.

Renee is sitting alone, watching Ajay and Natalie interact with the tiniest smirk on her face. Renee has lost so much more than he has and yet he hates himself for wondering if her condition is not somehow kinder. Is it better to not be able to recall all that you have lost, to not know that where once there was love there are only telegrams edged in black and memories of what once was?

Elliott used to have a family. Brothers and a mom and all that entailed. Family trips and chaotic dinners and stupid fights that didn't matter because at the end of everything, they all loved each other so much. One by one that love had gone away, and the last vestiges of it, the part that was strongest of all as it moved inside his mother's heart, is slowly fading away, and now Elliott is alone.

Elliott wakes each morning with the knowledge that there is no one left to love him.

And so he tries to make them. He tries to be adored, he tries to matter and he longs for that feeling again. That certainty that there will always be someone who loves him no matter how he screws up because in Elliott's mind, screw up is all he does.

He calls his mom because he still loves her, loves her more than anyone else but he's so afraid. Afraid of the days where she can't remember his name, days which are more common than not now and he knows he is losing her. The last person in the whole damn universe who loves Elliott Witt is slowly forgetting the fact. 

He's under no illusions. He's not the only one here with a sad story and a broken heart, but he's... more alone, he thinks. Anita hasn't lost her family, they have lost her, but how much it must mean to watch her on the screen, seeing her fight her way back to them with all they ever taught her, knowing that she lives and thinks of them always. 

No one is waiting for Elliott to come home. 

He's not entirely sure, but he thinks that Bloodhound comes from a place where neighbours are family, where everyone is a single unit and they only fight because they want to bring their family in from the cold and show them a better way. Bloodhound fights, but Bloodhound can always go home.

He watches Ajay tinker with her drone while Natalie offers her some pointers and he feels on the edge of all things. He knows he is a burden. He wonders if he's liked or tolerated, and knows in the same breath there isn't much about him to like. 

His eyes it seems have had all they can stand of friendships that exist effortlessly, because he feels so much that every interaction is a performance. There is no Elliott any more, only the mirage, the Mirage, and he just doesn't matter. He doesn't know how to. He watches every step he makes and hates that everyone else does too. He just wants to be Elliott, and to have Elliott be loved. He wants to hurt and have people give a shit that he does, he doesn't want to have to pay some admission in stupid jokes and winks to have people care that he's sad and have them need to make it right. 

He wants to be noticed and missed. He wants to know that people feel better just because he is around, and instead he feels like a chore. 

He just...

He wants people to love him unconditionally, just as he loves them.

He loves them so much. He needs them and appreciates them, and that is why he is constantly paying the toll for their affections.

Renee, Ajay, hell, even Path, they deserve love even in their worst moments.

Elliott has to earn it.

He just wishes there was one more person to love him when he's awful. When he's down and feeling the crushing grief of all he has lost like knives, he just wants someone to care.

But Elliott has built a whole new man out of lies and trickery, and that man cannot be sad.

Cannot hurt.

Because that is not Mirage at all.

Elliott feels abandoned and short changed by those who owe him nothing. Elliott feels alone, because he let himself think he could matter and then realised there were rules. 

They probably care in the way that humans do when he's sad, and they probably notice too when he's not as his best, if only for the silence that surrounds him. But that is not the Elliott they know, the one he made them see, and he feels guilty for not being the man he pretended to be, for confusing them with his sadness and making them uncomfortable.

No one wants a project.

He catches sight of Caustic, of the murderous sim and the thoughtless daredevil out of the corner of his eye and knows they do not care for love. Perhaps Octavio cares a little, but his sense of love and worship is so fucking warped and twisted from a childhood where money was used in place of parenting that it's no wonder he's such a damn mess. Octavio only loves until someone tells him no, but then he doesn't hate. He just moves on, and there's always someone else on the end of a camera lens to tell him he is amazing and, for now, that is all that Octavio needs.

Perhaps he's getting old, but Elliott knows that one day Octavio's reliance on the simpering love of faceless fans won't be enough for him anymore. One day the kid is going to feel lonely and hurt, and he's going to realise that it's all his fault for being complacent when he should have been contrary, for letting the world struggle by while he lived as though life itself were a right, and that's gonna hit him hard. 

And it should. Some lessons have to be learned the hard way.

It's a pressure, heavy and smothering like lava, burning into every part of him because at the very end of everything, Elliott is ashamed. Ashamed of the lies he created, ashamed of the envy he feels for his other self. Mirage is adored, Mirage is funny and loved and people like him.

No one much likes Elliott.

He certainly doesn't.

He rolls his shoulder subconsciously, pressing a hand to the place that had stung and bitten not so long ago when the hacker had taken offence to him.

He envies Hyeon more than anything. 

Hyeon is calm, cool and cold. Hyeon makes it seem like he can never hurt, because he would never make the mistake of ever letting anyone get close enough to do such a thing. Elliott is certain that Hyeon is never lonely, because he only ever wants to be left alone.

He knows that isn't true. Enough shit has gone down now that the raw parts of Hyeon were exposed, however briefly, and underneath the cybernetics and the disdain there was the hint of someone who needed a friend.

Elliott cannot be Hyeon's friend. They are both such awful fucking liars that they could never be close. 

But Elliott holds Hyeon in the weirdest place, admiration and jealousy and irritation and pity. Hyeon has lost something, he recognises the look, but Hyeon is also focused and so damn angry. Elliott doesn't do well with anger.

Not anymore. 

Not since he wasted so much time on it himself, raging at the universe for all it took from him without ever giving anything back. Hyeon wants vengeance, but unlike Elliott, he has a target in mind. 

Sometimes Elliott thinks that in a previous life he must have been the most awful fuck, to be where he is now. He fights in the games even though he has long since lost the memory of why, and he tries and stumbles and messes up and hurts and hurts and _hurts_ , and has no idea where he's headed. 

He's sick. Sick of being judged, of getting everything wrong and he is so damn sick of fucking up because he does, he knows that, he knows that the fault is his own and he hates it, hates himself and wishes there was some way to start again.

He's in a spiral of always trying to clean up his own damn mess and he wants out.

He wants...

He wants to stop disappointing himself. He wants to stop being so needy, so stupid, so cruel. 

He just wants to be loved.

Doesn't he deserve that?

He watches Makoa pick up Ajay's drone from the floor, handing it to her with a smile.

Probably not.

No.

Actually no.

Elliott never really thought he was perfect.

But he used to think he was good enough.

Maybe.

No.

He's not. He never was. People spend time with him waiting for it to be over and after all the shit he's pulled recently he sees that now.

Elliott's only chance at being loved was the unconditional kind, and now all of that has gone away.

So he has a choice.

Be better.

Or be lonely.

Ajay drops her drone _again_ because she's a lot of things but far from graceful.

It rolls to a stop at his feet.

...

Time to make a choice, Witt.


End file.
